Is your website actually over-optimised?

Search engine optimisation is important for getting your site noticed and ensuring that it gets traffic and delivers return on investment for your business. However, SEO is a delicate balance and apply it wrongly and it can actually have a negative effect. So what are some of the signs that your site could be over optimised?

The problem with keyword stuffing

Too many keywords

For a long time keywords were seen as the holy grail of SEO. Add enough of them to your site and it would shoot to the top of the search rankings regardless of the quality of the other content. These days Google and other search companies have rather more sophisticated systems at work. These look not only at keywords but at the readability of text.

This means your site text has to be readable. If your business is selling bathroom accessories, for example, having the phrase ‘bathroom accessories’ in every sentence of your blog posts is not going to make it a great read. Visitors will quickly be turned off and go elsewhere.

Link fatigue and low-quality links

Link fatigue

Having too many links can be equally negative. Again, the improved intelligence at work in search engine crawlers, especially in recent Google updates, rewards the quality and authority of links so you can’t just include them for their own sake. They have to be relevant and from reliable sources.

You can understand Google’s position. Serving up poor quality sites in search results is not good for their image. Employing a good Dublin SEO specialist like http://www.rycomarketing.ie/ will help ensure that your site gets the right degree of optimisation and that you don’t overdo things.

What to do

How to fix an over-optimised site

We’ve seen that the signs of an over optimised website are poor readability. This is usually down to over-stuffing with keywords and the use of too many links of variable quality. The way to fix this is to ensure you have good quality, readable content that delivers a useful message for your site’s visitors and doesn’t read like a sales pitch.

Of course, keywords and links are still important but they need to be the right ones. You should research carefully the ones that are most likely to deliver effective results, and include them sparingly. The same goes for links so make sure that they’re relevant and that they are to quality, respected sites.

Summary

This article explains the signs that a website might be over-optimised for search engines rather than for readers. It covers keyword stuffing making content unreadable, having too many low-quality or irrelevant links, and how modern search engines reward readability and link quality over sheer volume, recommending a focus on genuinely useful, well-written content and carefully chosen, relevant links.

Questions this article raises

• How can a business tell whether their own site has become over-optimised?
• What’s a reasonable keyword density to aim for in a page of content?
• How has Google’s approach to over-optimisation changed since this was written?